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Archive of 43k+ Donald Trump Twitter Screenshots

pikaso.me

11–20 of 35 posts

Re: Archive of 43k+ Donald Trump Twitter Screenshots

#11
post #2

It's unfortunate that all those permalinks to his old tweets are dead. A lot of other tweets, blog posts, and news articles are now broken.

This (and going private in Twitter) is the reason BBC uses screenshots instead of direct embeds (the link is still on the text and/or caption).

Re: Archive of 43k+ Donald Trump Twitter Screenshots

#12

> Today, we are releasing the resulting files to the public. This archive contains screenshots of 43,475 Donald Trump tweets from May 2009 to May 2020. Does anyone have any insight as to why the tweets are archived as screenshots, as opposed to text? > (Direct download, 2.6 GB) Assuming each tweet plus its associated metadata is roughly ~500 bytes, then the 43k tweets in text form would be approximately 22 megabytes.…

Did they stop collecting at some point?

As they just permabanned him, it'd be possible (and great) to have a complete archive, for history preservation.

Re: Archive of 43k+ Donald Trump Twitter Screenshots

#13
post #7

> Today, we are releasing the resulting files to the public. This archive contains screenshots of 43,475 Donald Trump tweets from May 2009 to May 2020. Does anyone have any insight as to why the tweets are archived as screenshots, as opposed to text? > (Direct download, 2.6 GB) Assuming each tweet plus its associated metadata is roughly ~500 bytes, then the 43k tweets in text form would be approximately 22 megabytes.…

Screenshots are for some reason to be better proof than just text? I think it's a layman's fallacy.

Literally right click, inspect, edit

Re: Archive of 43k+ Donald Trump Twitter Screenshots

#14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screenshots are for some reason to be better proof than just text? I think it's a layman's fallacy.

Literally right click, inspect, edit

...and then screenshot the editied tweet? Op’s point is (i think) that there is no more verifiability to a screenshot than to the text itself.

Not from the perspective of verifiability, but from the perspective of showing them as they were seen in the moment (fonts, profile icons, layout) screenshots do seem a touch more historically accurate

Re: Archive of 43k+ Donald Trump Twitter Screenshots

#16
It turns out things online don't exist forever.

There are lots of things that are deleted and are impossible to find afterwards because somebody has to archive it and at some point that "somebody" stops caring. So when things like the service they used to host the content clear up old content, things don't get reuploaded.

I really hope that these tweets are not only stored, but stored in a way that makes it difficult to prevent manipulation. I think many of Trump's tweets (and his family) are historic. Hopefully they're archived in a way that they last decades/centuries.

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